Flashdance

1983 "Something happens when she hears the music... it's her freedom. It's her fire. It's her life."
6.2| 1h35m| R| en| More Info
Released: 14 April 1983 Released
Producted By: Paramount
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

Alex Owens, a teen juggling between two odd jobs, aspires to become a successful ballet dancer. Nick, who is her boss and lover, supports and encourages her to fulfil her dream.

... View More
Stream Online

Stream with Prime Video

Director

Producted By

Paramount

AD
AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

Stream on any device, 30-day free trial Watch Now

Trailers & Images

Reviews

Ehirerapp Waste of time
KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.
Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
djfrost-46786 With a good note, soundtrack is great. It's almost just an average movie. Kinda is. Just another Footloose n Dirty Dancing. Best parts are the girls dancing in underwear. Not today, girl dancers are different. 4 movie but 5 cause the girls are hot. Story is so so.
Ian (Flash Review)With a story as thin as a White Castle burger, the story gets totally squashed by the vibrant and avant-guard dance scenes which are over the top 80s in style. The director failed at evoking any emotion from the young protagonist dancer who tries to work her way from, believe it or not, a welder to getting accepted to a prestigious dance school. The failings lie within a story that is choppy, unfocused, poorly paced and edited. That being said, there is a killer break dancing scene and I give it credit for actually focusing on the dancing, more than other 80s dance-focused movies, which are boldly memorable. Lastly, why are there so many scenes of people walking down industrial train tracks in the 80s? There was a random scene of that here too.
Wuchak Released in 1983, "Flashdance" is a drama/music/romance film starring Jennifer Beals as, Alex Owens, an 18 year-old welder in Pittsburgh who dreams of being a professional dancer and longs to be accepted into a prestigious school. She dances at a nightclub in her spare time, which is contrasted by the strip club across the street, owned by a sleazebag who tries to lure the respectable dancers into his seedy lair (Lee Ving). One of her friends aspires to be a figure skater (Sunny Johnson) and another friend a stand-up comedian (Kyle T. Heffner). Meanwhile her tall, dark and handsome boss takes a liking to her (Michael Nouri). This is an entertaining dance flick with the requisite early 80's soundtrack. All the dance sequences were performed by the uncredited French dancer Marine Jahan, who later sued the producers for not crediting her (the brief break-dancing scene was done by a dude). While the wide-eyed Beals and Jahan are in top shape and comely enough, I favor Sunny (the skater).I was impressed by the quality characterizations for a relatively short sports movie. I call it a "sports movie" because that's essentially what it is – "Rocky" with a female protagonist and dancing instead of boxing. I also like the Pittsburgh locations. Despite my positive feelings, the less-popular "Heavenly Bodies," which came out 9½ months later and stars cutie Cynthia Dale, is superior IMHO. The film runs 95 minutes and was shot in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. GRADE: B
chaos-rampant It takes practice to probe ourselves for insight of how we felt about something, it's not easy. Easier to numb ourselves, watch and forget it afterwards, but in this way we never really know anything. This is also in a roundabout way the point behind musicals, easy to be numbed, takes practice to probe and push yourself to create something that is true.The enemy of the protagonist in the musical or dance film then is compromise, mediocrity. It's the nagging worry that life will never amount to something, it will be drowned in routine—the antidote is dance, love, staging the circumstances that will permit purity of expression. In the musical this usually took the shape of showmen and women fighting to stage a show that sublimates the difficulties, this is also the case here, but with a twist.A final show is promised early on, a dance audition that makes or breaks her future (she thinks), failing which she's going to become just another 9 to 5 person chasing after the next bill. The place is glum Pittsburgh, she works in a factory by day. Around her we see the people who have been numbed by failure, lost their color—the failed comedian, her ice-rink dancer friend who ends up on the floor of a sleazy titty bar after a bad performance.They could have done something here. A bleak urban landscape instead of Broadway, the factory as the place where self is constructed to be only another cog in the machine—and yet in this place, dance, expression, sexuality. Her latenight show (she's an exotic dancer by night) struggling to find purity and truth in the midst of cheap thrills, still exhilarating in spite of how viewers consume it. Can dance become routine? Does it matter how the viewers see it?Their twist was something else. The final show is always postponed and the fight to stage it and dream to be someone are dredged from a pseudo Cassavetes desperation about life instead of using the snappy cadence of the musical. A bit of dance in the beginning and end and the whole middle is an hour of wallowing. The idea must have been, first make the viewer bleed, serve us 'reality' instead of a musical fairytale.But what I see is no less of a fairytale. A materialism about the difficulties but when it comes to the last release, the dance audition, we go back to the snappy, idealized Hollywood dance we expected all along. She triumphs of course. An awestruck committee member claps childishly at how good. The slice- of-life was merely an idealized style, a trope rather than commitment, so that it manages in one swoop to kill both the fun and the honesty. Terrible.